


Cherokee Rose

by sweetvampirous



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Glenn Rhee, Blood, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Daryl Dixon & Glenn Rhee Friendship, Hanahaki Disease, Hiding Medical Issues, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Negan Kills Glenn Rhee, One-Sided Attraction, One-Sided Relationship, Past Character Death, Short & Sweet, Short One Shot, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-03-13 09:38:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18938290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetvampirous/pseuds/sweetvampirous
Summary: Negan is suffering from Hanahaki Disease, an illness born from unrequited love.





	1. Chapter 1

Negan recognizes the feeling early enough to escape any onlookers; aimlessly wandering off into the thick brush with an aura confident purpose and not the abrupt panic radiating within. Calculated strides were taken until he was hidden enough to start running, tripping over his own legs and using a tree to regain support.

Dignity still intact, his body is racked with convulsions, dry heaving, coughing until the air is gone from weakened lungs - choking. Walkers be damned. A thick stream of crimson leaks through lips clamped shut. ‘If I keep my head up, it won’t fucking happen this time,’ - it’s a bullshit internal monologue every time.

It was damnation, a promise he would not be taken out by the undead the first time he coughed the vibrant butter yellow stamens into a leather glove in the middle of the night. He thinks too much about when his face had been so close to a one Rick Grimes while he laughed about taking Dixon away. He swore when Rick disgustingly sneezed clear into his face it was because of the pollen on his breath. He doesn’t remember the sound of leather on skin afterward. That would have been something nice to jack off to.  
Now blood bubbles up his throat, spilling down the sides of his mouth, spattering with every cough. Blood dripping and running down his hands, down the leather of his jacket and blending into the scarf and staining his white tee.

Negan’s body forces up full blooms and teeth torn petals from his lungs, his windpipe, filling his mouth until it all spilled out, every soft petal, stamen, and leaf. An assurance that he only had days remaining until his respiratory system couldn’t handle it anymore - his circulatory was already bowing out and all odds were bet on a heart attack. He’s given in after dropping the hope he had been so confident in. He convinced himself the invasive shrubbery would dissolve, disappear, do whatever it was meant to when he took Daryl back to Sanctuary. With his body giving out, and a leather-wrapped hand clawing at his scorching throat, the other tearing at his aching chest before grabbing desperately at the flowers and pulling them from his mouth until they were spilling down his jaw like a clown’s rag alongside hot tears. With every breath being an agony, something to be hidden when bloodied petals and sharp leaflets ended up in his hands. Breathing again is an excruciating effort even without a mess of Cherokee Roses at his feet, he knows Daryl Dixon will never fall in love with him.


	2. Cloves & Citrus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Instagram asked for more... I somehow have a ton

It all started with coughing up pollen into a leather glove, bright yellow critical against the matte black. A fifty-fifty death sentence that the Savior’s leader would turn up on the better half of, he was damn certain, doubt had not crossed his mind for a single second, he was going to bet the house as everything was stacked in his favor; from status to good looks. Then came the blood, the pollen became pieces of stamens, shortness of breath keeping his bloodied mouth shut, brilliant green leaves and thorns keeping him from eating with the damage they’d done on the way up. Weight loss, the kind that ended up justified as more welcome than not; he’d been on the heavier side before the apocalypse.

Negan coughs violently for weeks, turns up less and less around Sanctuary, around Alexandria. There’s no need to alarm his workers, those he led to safety and security, to give anyone a reason to think he had been compromised. Negan knows he should have felt powerful, untouchable, should have been strutting around his territories and usual haunts showing off like a goddamned peacock. Thinks that by now he should have been walking around with a hard-on that he couldn’t’ help but palm and obscene stains on his pants instead of blood constantly dripping from his sleeve and collar, crimson fluid in his lungs with the overpowering stench of clove and citrus wafting from every pore that enters a room before he does. The metallic smell of blood and bile only a threat to the senses, but he can‘t help or cover it anymore by drowning himself in Eau De Whateverthefuck head to toe. 

He’s sure the attempts to mask it are a further assault. Dixon mentions the sweet odor when his cell door opens, tell his captor he‘s worse than a walker. Negan, not one for patience, slams it shut and feels the roots settling further, tightening, blooming. Growing in his lungs, the blossoms and vines squeeze Negan’s heart and cut his oxygen as immediately as they flourish; he doubles over, pawing at the leather covering his chest. He can’t recuperate to throw Dwight off and into the wall when he rushes to help. He can’t hear the other man’s gasp when he’s shocked to see the blood from Negan’s throat spill in waterfalls expelled out on the floor in harsh, thick splatters regurgitated alongside fresh white petals, front cover of Homes & Gardens worthy blooms.

Negan is up from the examination table, refusing to believe he collapsed even when it‘s obvious he‘s in an entirely different room and not outside Dixon‘s cell. Out of embarrassment, he remembers the feeling of his eyes rolling up and waking up on the floor of his apartment another time. A harsh sunburn covers the red flush of shame in his cheeks. Obedient and loyal, Dwight tries to explain gently what Negan already knows, what never need be confirmed. Negan’s clove-scented breath drifts across Dwight’s face, growling threats of death and dismemberment, eyes shifting toward the Doctor in a glare before he takes back a leather-winged vest for the rightful owner and leaves Doctor Carson and his most loyal Savior in shock at the diagnosis. Negan, in their minds, has long since been stripped bare from the notion of humanity.

There’s no luxury for surgery in the new world, and Negan wouldn’t have taken any such option in the old one either. He wouldn’t allow any doctor to cut through his chest to get at his heart or lungs and rid the invasion in his body. In any world, he would have been making the same choices. It was Daryl Dixon or it was nothing.

Negan is success defined. The perfect leader, with hundreds of people alive to show for it. Worshipped, loved and feared all in one inning was the man who has everything, anything, more than Rick Grimes can show for his own pitiful efforts. Negan offered Daryl everything he had at his disposal and then himself... and he did not fucking want it.

The only thing Daryl’s given Negan is a punch so hard that the red mark, the bruising and stinging of his knuckles was still something Negan could fuck himself cross-eyed and senseless to the next day. Daryl, obviously, had not died that night, it was Glenn and that insufferable idiot Negan couldn’t remember the name of, but guesses his own fate was sealed with that blow to the jaw and finding pretty blue eyes from his favourite cock-sucking angle looking at him from the lineup of Rick’s group.

Negan stops before he kicks the door leading outside open, knows he can’t afford the strain on something that gave only seconds of gratification with his days coming to an end. He spits the blood clogging his trachea into the dirt outside, squishing the flowers that follow with his boot before any would-be passerby could identify. Negan used to be the man that left barbed wire in his wake. Now he was leaving Cherokee Roses in abundant, sickening trails.

Daryl Dixon is the only thing Negan realizes he can’t control. A challenge he normally would have liked, spending those nights alone with a vision of what was to be while he stroked his engorged cock. Now, this felt like a race for the prize, maybe because it was. Every heartbeat and breath closer to death was something blue eyes and sweat matted hair was still worth — would always be worth if not to disease, was predicted by determination and brainlessness. Negan wants to pretend he doesn’t remember when blue eyes and lifeless brunette hair was something to lose your life over. He remembers it every time he picks up his fucking baseball bat.

Love was punishment, in more ways than the disease of the unrequited. Negan felt that shame every time he thought of trading his wife for getting his dick extra attention on the side. He was trading her memory in his heart for .... redneck white trash. Plain and simple. He knows the qualities and values he sees, that he’s felt first hand. Fearlessness and volatile; dangerous. Loyal to a fault, most likely. A determination and mental strength that Negan hadn’t seen since he looked in the mirror this morning to wash pollen from his beard. He wonders what’s under all of that to unwrap, gets hard at the notion of unwrapping Daryl from his clothes in a more consensual setting. Still, it doesn’t make up for dying over some backwoods hayseed. Still, he wants to bury his nose in that fucking smell, the musk of earthiness and unwashed, caked up sweat that overpowers old leather and pull away with dirt on his own face.

Negan wonders while battering another hemorrhage of gruesome bouquets into the dirt if he’s going to grow into some damn bush if Dwight and Simon do not, in fact, have the decency to throw his body in some type of casket before shoveling cold dirt onto his corpse. Maybe the vines would stop at death, maybe they’d break through flesh and flourish. He guesses he’ll have to afford them more points, more... kindness and respect than before so they don’t stand beside and gang up on a stoic redneck wondering why he’s been left everything. Negan thinks it would be fan-fucking-tastic if Daryl could start hurling Sunflowers on the spot, spitting up seeds. In the same instance he’d like to see Daryl Dixon choke out something of that massive size, Negan knows he would never wish it on him.


End file.
